THE NEWSLETTER OF THE SHERLOCK HOLMES SOCIETY OF LONDON Roger Johnson, Mole End, 41 Sandford Road, Chelmsford CM2 6DE e-mail: [email protected] no. 217 7th December 2001 To renew your subscription, send 12 stamped, self-addressed Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, Belgium, Russia, Italy and Spain! The envelopes or (overseas) send 12 International Reply Coupons or names of John Hall, Hirayama Yuichi, Carolyn & Joel Senter, Stu £6.00 or US$13.00 for 12 issues. Dollar checks should be payable to Shiffman, Sébastien Le Page, Mia Stampe, Jean-Pierre Cagnat and Jean Upton. Dollar prices quoted without qualification refer to US Wladimir Bogomoletz alone should have the Sherlockian grinning dollars. Please note that I give such addresses and prices as I have. happily. This latest addition to a distinguished series can be had for If I don’t provide details of importers or agents, it’s because I don’t £9.00 post-paid from John Hall (20 Drury Avenue, Horsforth, have those details. LeedsLS18 4BR), or for $12.00 plus postage from Classic Specialties From CADS 40 I learn of the deaths this year of two fine British (PO Box 19058, Cincinnati, OH 45219, USA). actors. Norman Rodway was Dr Watson to Ronald Pickup’s Watson’s Weapons — For and Against by Dr Tim Healey is the Holmes in Cecil Jenkins’ 1990 BBC Radio 3 play The Singular Case latest publication of the Friends of Dr Watson. If you want to know of Sherlock H and Sigmund F . Paul Daneman played Watson in what life was like for the British army medico in Afghanistan 120 Gillette’s play at the old Birmingham Rep in 1952, to Alfred Burke’s years ago, it’s all here. This 44-page A4 booklet costs £7.00 or Holmes; in 1968 he was the Sholto brothers in BBC TV’s production $14.00 to non-members (sterling cheques payable to Richard J. of The Sign of Four with Peter Cushing and Nigel Stock. Richard Stacpoole-Ryding; US dollars in cash, please), from Richard Dalby notes the death on 31 October of Jenny Laird , whose long Stacpoole-Ryding, 14 Western Close, Letchworth, Herts. SG6 4SZ. acting career included playing Mrs Hudson in The Masks of Death Over the years various pranksters have devised comic captions for (1984), with Cushing and John Mills. Victorian illustrations, most of them genuinely funny, thank heaven. Barrie Roberts is one of the most reliable writers of new Sherlock Eric Monahan’s new 40-page booklet Sherlock Holmes Illustrated, Holmes stories, so I’m delighted to see his first novel Sherlock with Alternative Captions stands up well, and would make a nice Holmes and the Railway Maniac newly reissued in an attractive silly Christmas present — for a friend or for yourself. You can buy paperback edition by Allison & Busby (Suite 111, Bon Marche copies post-paid at £4.70 or $8.95 from Highcliff, 14 Silver Bridge Centre, 241 Ferndale Road, London SW9 BJ; £6.99). He captures the Close, Broadsands Park, Paignton, Devon TQ4 7NW. Watson-Doyle style better than most, and he knows his Canon and Eric tells me that Sayers on Holmes: Essays and Fiction on Sherlock his history. It’s astonishing that no one else seems to have thought of Holmes, published by the Mythopoeic Society (Joan Marie Verba, having Holmes investigate the anarchist outrages that culminated in PO Box 1363, Minnetonka, MN 55346, USA) at $9.50, is in stock at the siege of Sidney Street in 1912. Sherlock Holmes and the Railway Crime In Store (14 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9HE) at £8.99. Maniac is an engrossing and intelligent read. I look forward to seeing the rest of Barrie Roberts’ books in paperback. On Thursday 13 December there’ll be a sale of ‘valuable printed books and manuscripts’ at Sotheby’s (34-35 New Bond Street, Also from Allison & Busby, but in hardcover at £17.99, is The Secret London W1A 2AA; phone 020 7293 5000), which will include Diary of Dr Watson by Anita Janda. It’s not a new idea to present the various works by Arthur Conan Doyle as well as items from his uncensored truth behind the published writings, but other writers library (among them Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea inscribed have used it to parody the Canon; Ms Janda gives us a generally to Sir Arthur ‘from his old friend’ the author), and several plausible and always entertaining account of what really happened in watercolours by Richard Doyle. These lots are ‘the property of a those cases of the Severed Ears, the Phantom Hound, Black Jack of great nephew of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’. (*Any prizes for guessing Ballarat and the rest. In addition she gives us a self-portrait of an which one?*) Viewing is on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and intelligent, thoughtful, courageous and very likable man. It’s right Wednesday. Well worth a visit, I’d say. that Watson’s name should be in the title: The Secret Diary of Dr Watson is his story, not Holmes’s, and the better for it. I wonder if There are new catalogues available from Janus Books (PO Box Ms Janda will be tempted to continue the diary . I almost hope not. 40787, Tucson, AZ 85717, USA) and Classic Specialties (PO Box 19058, Cincinnati, OH 45219, USA) — both with a good amount of Just published at £8.99 by the Mercat Press (53 South Bridge, Sherlockiana. Classic Specialties carry a lot besides books, of course. Edinburgh EH1 1YS) is McLevy: The Edinburgh Detective by James McLevy. The splendid cover photograph of Edinburgh in the 1890s CADS 40 is, as always with this splendid magazine, full of gives a slightly false impression, but it’s the only wrong thing about stimulating and entertaining articles about Crime And Detective this excellent book. McLevy, an Irishman with no love for the Stories. Nothing specifically Sherlockian this time, but CADS is a English, entered the city’s police force in 1830, became a detective must if you’re at all interested in the field. The price is: UK £5.00; three years later, and wrote these memoirs in the 1850s. Quintin Europe £5.50; USA (airmail) $10.00, (surface) $9.00. Sterling Jardine, who has written a foreword to this new edition, observes: cheques should be payable to G.H. Bradley; US payments should be ‘McLevy was clearly a one-off, a character who would have trouble in dollar bills. (Geoff Bradley, 9 Vicarage Hill, South Benfleet, fitting into a modern police force, yet whose perception and Essex SS7 1PA.) knowledge of his streets and his subjects would have made him too Play the Game: Victorian and Edwardian Sporting Songs is a valuable to be excluded from it.’ This welcome new edition of his delicious CD of ditties on the subject of, well, just about every sport writings shows us the city into which Arthur Conan Doyle would be known to our great-grandparents — cycling, rugger, boating, golf, born in 1859 — but that’s a bonus. McLevy: The Edinburgh billiards, soccer ... and huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. Arthur Conan Detective is a cracking good read. Doyle is represented as the author of ‘A Hunting Morning’, from his Volume 11 of The Shoso-in Bulletin sums up the international nature 1898 book Songs of Action . Listening to Ian Partridge, Peter Savidge of our great game, boasting as it does contributors from Japan, the and the Song & Supper Club, with Jennifer Partridge on piano, is like USA, the UK, the Czech Republic, France, Denmark, Taiwan, attending a really good smoking concert at an Edwardian country house — gorgeous! The CD is available at major record stores or direct from the publishers, Just Accord Music (PO Box 224, Holmes , with Clive Merrison & Michael Williams, as a boxed set of Tadworth, Surrey KT20 5YJ) at £9.99 post-paid. 36 cassettes with Bert Coules’s book, at £112.50. The recent, very entertaining BBC TV drama series Murder Rooms is It must be the Silly Season. According to the Torquay Herald just out on video. I need hardly remind you that these fictional Express for 2 November, Rodger Garrick-Steele now accuses Arthur mysteries deal with the friendship between the young Arthur Conan Conan Doyle of murdering Charles Dawson — to cover up his Doyle and his mentor Dr Joseph Bell — recreating them, in effect, as (ACD’s) perpetration of the Piltdown hoax. What next — the Watson and Holmes. Charles Edwards (who was, astonishingly, invasion of Poland? allowed to play the part clean-shaven) is pleasant enough as Conan The Harpooners of the Sea Unicorn will talk about ‘The Blue Doyle, but it’s Ian Richardson who’s the real star of these films . He Carbuncle’ after dinner on 15 December (Michael E. Bragg, Box is quite superb as Dr Bell — authoritative, coldly scientific, but 799, St Charles, MO 63302-0799, USA). humane. The plots, particularly of The White Knight Stratagem , are elegant and ingenious (though The Patient’s Eyes does tend to give The Annual Dinner of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London will the impression that Conan Doyle must have been incapable of be held at the House of Commons on Saturday 5 January. The Guest inventing a character or a situation, instead drawing everything from of Honour will be the Commissioner of the City of London Police, his own experience). The supporting casts are impressive — John Perry Nove, QPM. The previous evening there’ll be a Club Night at Sessions, Rik Mayall, Annette Crosbie, Anton Lesser, et al. And by the New Commonwealth Club in Northumberland Avenue, to which golly, the films look good.